Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions - Keep Britain Tidy

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Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions There were a number of examples where interviewees appeared to have been trying to do the right thing, but were nevertheless prosecuted and fined by the local authority. In one instance an individual was charged with fly-tipping because the council believed he had left bulky waste outside his property. In fact the individual had employed a legitimate waste disposal company to remove it but they had failed to do so as agreed. This individual was prosecuted but acquitted by the judge who told the council that the case should have never gone to court. However, he still got a conditional discharge, which meant his name was put on record for 12 months. The individual also had to pay court costs of £800 as the judge said he had to get costs from someone. He also had to take time off work to attend four court appearances during his prosecution. The individual said his prosecution was just prior to a blitz on fly-tipping by the council – he believes this is part of the reason why his case went to prosecution in the first place. He believes the case could have been easily handled out of court which would have been less time consuming and less expensive. In another case an individual and his friend were both prosecuted for putting rubbish bags outside someone else’s house (on the evening before collection day). They put one bag in the rubbish bin – which already had some rubbish in it - and two beside the bin. The individuals couldn’t put it outside their own residence because of the councils ‘no side waste’ policy. They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong as they believed the waste was going to be picked up on the following day (collection day). The council then prosecuted the individuals and they received a fine of £175 each. The interviewee says they felt criminalised by the process. He felt that a £50 fine and an apology to the person whose house they put the rubbish outside would have been more appropriate. In this final example, an individual who was working on his own house took some brickwork to the tip in a trailer to dump as domestic waste. As the tip workers knew him as a trader, however, they said he had to pay. When the individual said it was waste from his own house, the tip workers said they needed someone from the council to verify this. The council were unable to send anyone to make the check for at least one week, which left the individual with a trailer full of bricks. As the trailer was rented, he couldn’t afford to keep it for longer than a week. After making every effort to get the council and even the police to help, he decided to dump the bricks on the steps of Town Hall in protest. He neatly stacked the bricks and contacted the local paper. He was charged and prosecuted for fly-tipping. The individual believed he had done everything possible to get rid of the waste legally. Thinking strategically Policing and enforcement was generally thought not to be the way forward in controlling fly-tipping. Rather, a more strategic approach should be taken that deals with some cross-cutting issues. For example, while increasing prices at tip sites might reduce usage and therefore reflect well on the council’s use of 67
Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions landfill, it won’t actually help control fly-tipping. As one offender put it “The government wants us to reduce the amount of waste we are disposing of, but all we are doing is we are responding to customer requirement. You don’t get fewer leaves fall from the trees just because waste is more expensive.” The same interviewee went on “Waste is a product of growth at the end of the day and if the government want the economy to grow they have to understand that waste is going to grow with it.” Another interviewee commented that the current regime did nothing to create any incentives for disposing of waste legitimately. “There is no incentive to dispose of your waste in a more responsible way.” Another commented on his friend’s fly-tipping “It was a case of laziness and ease really”, i.e. the default was to fly-tipping rather than proper disposal. The advice was summed up by one offender thus: “Basically what they’ve gotta do is sit down and say alright we need to make it more convenient, more accessible financially for small business people to start dumping their rubbish [at a legitimate site] rather than [fly-] tipping it…” 68
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Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions - Keep Britain Tidy

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